Comments on love

In reply to: I love you too posted by Mark Rosenfelder on 16:18 7/11/01

Say, you're good at this.

Thanks :-)

In Barakhinei you need an ending phatic particle (especially
in such an emotive sentence), probably ma for male speakers,
zêl for females.

Ah, I hadn't seen the bit on phatic particles. Yes, that sounds
right.

Kebreni: The benefactive would be the best choice, but I'm
not happy with the verb choice.

Well, I was trying to make do with what I saw :-).

Wede:i: Using 'heart' is clever, but I'm wondering if that's
the right organ; not all cultures see emotions as living in the heart. I
think I'll go with zurtau 'desire' instead, itself a derivative
meaning 'want to have'. So: Zuringtaku.

It's straight from the
page on Proto-Eastern Philology; under the heading Morphological
classes, the example showing the format for comparisons relates
proto-Eastern *lu:bek to Cuêzi lu:ve, Cadhinor
liubec, Axunashin ruwik, Obenzayet lüvag, and
Lufasha lü. Just a bit further down in "examples of verbs",
lu:bek is again used and linked to Lufasha lü.

I derived lúbo: by the sound-change rules from
proto-Eastern to Lufasha. However, they're specifically marked as "sketch
only; very inaccurate", so it's not surprising that proto-Eastern
lu:bawo should not turn into lúbo: -- especially since
the infinitive is already only one syllable long, lü. (In case
you're interested, the rules I used to derive the form were: lu:bawo
| aw --> o: | lu:bo:o | V: --> [12]/[+voice]_ |
lúbo:o | V --> &Oslash/_# | lúbo:.)

I went back to the word paru 'lip', and derived
parsu 'kiss' (the infix -s- derives a verb expressing the usual
action associated with a noun; cf. poc 'foot' --> pocsu
'kick'). That gives us the adjectivization pansyr 'dear,
loveable'

I see. This is the derivation "The infix -n- + final -(y)r
gives an adjective meaning 'having the quality of X' or 'liable to X'". The
text doesn't say when to use 'y' and when not; however, from the example
given I guess that derivation from nouns keeps the original vowel while
derivation from verbs changes the verb's final -u to -y-. Which, I suppose,
makes sense, since you state earlier that "The final -u is not part
of the root; it's a grammatical ending".

The same place also shows that consonants can get replaced by the
-n- infix, rather than having it added, as in boh'tu -->
bontur, which accounts for the loss of the r in parsu.

and from that the verb pansyru
'love'.

Ah, and this is "Nouns can be fairly freely converted into verbs by
adding -u (replacing a final vowel)", I suppose -- even though this process
is here applied to an adjective.

After all that, we get pensyniri 'I love
you'

Hm, this is inconsistent. Most Kebreni verbs appear to have a CVC(V)
structure with only two consonants and one stem vowel in the root (plus one
ending vowel), so which vowel to modify becomes obvious. What is not stated
is which vowel is the stem vowel in verbs having more than one vowel in the
root.

The process of forming the perfective involves switching "the last
two vowels", which is clear enough. Similarly, volition involves
switching "the first two vowels (that is, the added e- plus what was
the first vowel of the root", which is also unambiguous. The three examples
here show three single-vowel verbs, which means that the e- which got
put switched into second position moves to the end, since it was also the
second from the end.

The hard mood(?) to form is the benefactive (and its companion,
the antibenefactive. These talk about "fronting (or backing) the stem
vowel", without saying which vowel in a multi-vowel root is the stem
vowel.

The example seen a bit later in the conjugation table is pabadu
"laugh". This has the two vowels a and a in the root. The
benefactive given here is pabedi, indicating that the second a
got fronted to e and not the first. (It also gives the volitional
forms, imperfective and perfective, as abebadu and abebuda
respectively, thus showing that the e- does not move to the end here
and that "first two vowels" and "last two vowels" is always taken literally,
even when those sets do not overlap.)

However, this would imply that the verb pansyru, with the root
vowels a and y, has the stem vowel y, since that's the
second vowel of the root; this fronts to i. The benefactive would
then be not pensyri but pansiri (or, for benefactive to the
listener, pansiniri).

'loving is going on that benefits you'

This reminds me of "It stones whileunder it grows greeningly." and "Vance
may be in a state of pulling our legs" :-)